Middle East Initiative

After months of mass anti-government protests, Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika stepped down in early April after 20 years of rule. Protesters sought to take down a political system they said was corrupt, concentrating power in the hands of a few military, intelligence and business leaders. The tipping point came when Bouteflika, 82, announced he would run for a fifth term in office; protesters responded with slogans including “leave means leave” and “no fifth term.”

BEIRUT — The ongoing street demonstrations in Algeria and Sudan and the high-level changes in leadership they have sparked include political developments that are very different from the Arab Uprisings of 2010-11 (the so-called “Arab Spring”). We should watch two dynamics, in particular, to find out if this is genuinely a historic moment of change, or another re-run of previous uprisings and some toppled leaders of Arab authoritarian states that did not fundamentally change how power is exercised or how citizens are treated.

More and more perpetrators get away with human rights violations and crimes against humanity.

BEIRUT — The nationwide street demonstrations that have now toppled two long-serving and ageing dictators in Algeria and Sudan are particularly poignant, because they occur in two pedigree countries in the modern Arab struggles for freedom and dignity.

Born and raised in Israel, Ben Shitrit describes “identity” experiences like this as “powerful and good” because they compelled her to ensure that her own beliefs not interfere with her research. During two years of fieldwork in Israel and the West Bank, she focused on the Jewish settler movement, the ultra-Orthodox Shas, the Islamic Movement in Israel, and the Palestinian Hamas. Her resulting book was Righteous Transgressions: Women’s Activism on the Israeli and Palestinian Religious Right. 

BEIRUT — It is remarkable that peaceful street protests and demonstrations critical of the government have taken place simultaneously in recent weeks and months in at least 11 Arab countries. Ordinary people from all walks of life, but especially unemployed young men and women, continue to take to the streets in Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Algeria, Tunisia, Mauritania, Somalia, Palestine, Lebanon, and Morocco.

Thousands of Algerians again flooded streets across the country Friday in a “Million Man” march. Demonstrations first erupted last weekend, though state media only acknowledged the events on Tuesday.

Since early December 2018, protesters have gathered every Thursday in Amman’s Fourth Circle in the Zahran District in opposition to a revised version of the unpopular tax bill introduced last June. That original legislation had sparked a broad-based tax revolt across Jordan, which quickly turned into an informal referendum on the failures of neoliberal development—including diminishing social services, lower wages and rising unemployment. While the December 2018 and January 2019 protests echoed the economic refrains of the original June tax revolt, the tax protests took on a political character after the monarch approved the revised law.

BEIRUT — A great menace hovers over the Arab region and its people, and has started to nibble away at their societies and countries. Our region now is made up mostly of poor and vulnerable families, and it is corroding and fragmenting from within. Unlike the popular media images abroad of vast Arab wealth, the reality is the exact opposite. The Arab region is fracturing and disaggregating into a small group of wealthy people, a shrinking middle class, and masses of poor, vulnerable, and marginalized people who now account for 2/3 of all Arabs. Some 250 million people, out of a total Arab population of 400 million, are poor, vulnerable, and marginalized, according to important new research by Arab and international organizations.

Host Aroop Mukharji interviews Dr. Tarek Masoud, the Sultan of Oman Professor of International Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School, about the shifting political dynamics of the Middle East, the region's potential for democratization, and a triple snack of doughnuts, coffee, and Turkish delight.